Me and you and .... the HELL?

As I mentioned previously, I was SO looking forward to You and Me and Everyone We Know.

And it was SO CLOSE to being a cute lil indie! But, dammit...

<Channeling Sam Kinison>OOOOooohh! Oh! OH! OOOOOOOOOOOOH!</Channeling Sam Kinison>

Every single child in this movie is molested, molests another child, witnesses a molestation, or some mix thereof. Yes. Really.

The romance between the adults is kinda sweet, but it takes up less a third of the movie. The rest is a cringe-fest where you wonder if the parents of these kids were honestly OK with their children saying the lines and performing in the scenes they do.

Ebert wrote:

"14-year-old brother Peter (Miles Thompson) is being persecuted by two girls in his class named Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend). They are intensely interested in oral sex, but unsure about its theory and technique. They decide to practice on Peter. I know this sounds perverse and explicit, and yet the fact is, these scenes play with an innocence and tact that is beyond all explaining."

Um, no.

It is perverse and explicit. Because they're KIDS. For crying out loud anyway.

To yet again invoke the wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs: I'm surprised I even have to explain this.

Therefore, I can't really review this movie, because I can't get past the content. And I think it's because of my age-old problem that when something really controversial is performed in a movie, I'm ripped out of the moment by the fact that the actors and actresses had to actually do what you're seeing.

When it's in a novel, like Lolita or more recently Until I Find You by John Irving, the fact that these are fictional characters living only in words on a piece of paper, I can get past repugnant parts (especially if they have a point and don't seem gratuitous as in the two novels I mention here) because no animals were harmed, so to speak. But seeing kids mime sex and seeing little bitty kids talk about passing poop back and forth between their butts is just more than I take.

I watched it to the end, because I thought there might be a slim chance that these child sex scenes would be somehow redeemed at the end (while knowing in a sense that wasn't possible given that actual children acted the scenes out), because even if an attempt were made, it would've shown that the writer/director (Miranda July - whom I doubt has children of her own) understood that she had gone so far into taboo, she needed to at least attempt to crawl back out of the pit. But, no, we are just left in the utter darkness of the credits rolling up the screen, feeling like there aren't enough showers in the world to get clean again after that.